Thoughts on It Happened Tomorrow

   On Criterion, I watched It Happened Tomorrow, a 1944 fantasy film directed by René Clair, and co-written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, based on the one-act play "The Jest of Haha Laba" by Lord Dunsany. The film has a fun, whimsical feeling to it, mixing a fantasy premise with romance, set in the 1890s, where Lawrence Stevens (Dick Powell) is a newspaper columnist who writes obituaries, and he is given tomorrow's evening newspaper by an elderly newspaper man named Pop Benson, though he doesn't read the newspaper at first. He and his friends go to see a mind-reading act featuring the "Great Siglioni" Oscar Smith (Jack Oakie) and his "clairvoyant" assistant, Sylvia (Linda Darnell) (they are actually uncle and niece). Lawrence later gets Sylvia to go out on a date with him, and he notices the future date on the newspaper, as well as the predictions, like snowfall the next day, a job opening for a waiter preceding the firing of one, and most, importantly, a robbery at the box office of the opera during a performance. Lawrence takes Sylvia to the opera so he can be present during the robbery and write the article for the paper, but it backfires when the police question him on knowing things if he was there and knew all the details ahead of time, thinking he was in on it.

    The movie swirls in a series of adventures, with Lawrence taking advantage of the future editions of the newspaper, until the news isn't in his favor, and he tries to prevent fate from taking its course. I thought it was a fun movie with a quirky premise, adding in time travel via the future newspaper, the period setting of the 1890s (the film opens with a bookending sequence of the couple celebrating their 50th anniversary with their friends and family), and very charming. Clair also directed the equally charming I Married a Witch (1942), starring Veronica Lake as a witch who was burned at the stake in colonial Salem, puts a curse on the lineage of the man who burned her by causing his male descendants to marry the wrong woman, and she comes back to life in the 1940s to torture his latest male descendant, only to fall in love with him instead. I did prefer I Married a Witch more to It Happened Tomorrow, but they are fun, enjoyable fantasy comedies of the 1940s.

    The plot of It Happened Tomorrow, where a man tries to change events based on a future newspaper, did make me think of the 1990s TV show Early Edition, where Kyle Chandler played an everyman who receives "tomorrow's newspaper today," and they are local stories and headlines about bad things that he has to work to figure out the cause of, and doing the detective work to prevent from happening. I watched it sometimes as an adolescent, and thought it was a decent TV show, though not too well-remembered today.

    I would recommend this movie as an offbeat fantasy film with time travel elements, and something unique of the time in which it came out.

Thoughts on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Shorts Tour

    Yesterday at the IFC Center, I went to see a screening of a selection of shorts from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Most were narrative films, with one documentary, and one animated film. It was really interesting to watch a variety of short films, and I keep up with some short films that I see through Criterion, Le Cinema Club, and the Oscar-nominated and shortlisted short films. 

    My favorites were the following:

    Grandma Nai Who Plays Favorites, written and directed by Chheangkea, from Cambodia/France, where during her family's annual Qingming visit to sweep her tomb and have a picnic together, the ghost of Grandma Nai (Saroeun Nay) watches her chaotic family, who just pray to her for money and cars, and sees her likely queer grandson be made to court a girl for possible engagement. I liked the quietness of Grandma Nai sitting by her grandson and looking caring and understanding as the boy is polite but not romantically attracted to the girl, including when he is pressured by his mother to give her Grandma Nai's bracelet as a gift, something he clearly doesn't want to part with. It's a really lovely story that ends with dancing in a karaoke club.

    Susana, written and directed by Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas, from Mexico/U.S.A. Susana (Bonnie Hellman) is an American tourist in Mexico City, and is a middle-aged awkward-looking woman with thick glasses and bobbed red hair. She feels alone, and is taken in by a group of young American tourists, and parties with them, despite that they are condescending and clearly see her as their pet for entertainment. Mexican locals look on with wariness at how the group takes advantage of Susana. The story goes some interesting places, and I liked how it reminded me of Margo Martindale's touching performance in Alexander Payne's short film 14e Arrondissment, included in Paris Je T'aime, where she plays a solo middle-aged woman visiting Paris and contemplating her life.

    We Were the Scenery, directed by Christopher Radcliff, from the U.S.A. This was a documentary short focusing on Hoa Ti Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled Vietnam in 1975 and lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines, and ended up working as extras in Apocalypse Now. It was really fascinating listening to them talk about their memories of the war, fleeing via boat, and looking back on their scenes in the film and pointing out people they knew from the camp who were also cast in bit parts, and looking at their history as survivors of the Vietnam War. 

    The other films were good, but not as standout to me. Such Good Friends, written and directed by Bri Klaproth, from the U.S.A., focuses on the aftermath of a woman ending her toxic friendship via voicemail and the ripple effects it causes where his family take advantage of her. It was decent, and nice to recognize Mindy Sterling as the friend's mom, and I liked the darkly comedic ending. Hurikán, directed by Jan Saska and co-written by Saska and Václav Hašek, from the Czech Republic, was an animated short where the title character is a man with a pig's head, who is trying to impress a female bartender he has a crush on by rushing to get a beer keg for her stand, running into trouble with gangsters and cops and his own beer thirst. I liked the animation and the weirdness of it. Debators, written and directed by Alex Heller, from the U.S.A., focuses on an early morning debate team arguing a bill on minimum wage in front of their teacher judges (J. Cameron Smith and Kenneth Lonergan). It was decent, good for the first one to open the selections. And Azi, written and directed by Montana Mann, from the U.S.A., focused on the titular teenage girl on a weekend vacation with her best friend's family, and gets into an unexpected match of mind games with another guest. This I thought was OK, but didn't feel like it had much of a point to it, it just ended with a flat resolution to me.

    It was really good to go to the IFC Center, as I hadn't been there in many years, and it was formerly the Waverly Theater. I had gone to a midnight movie screening of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer there nearly twenty years ago, and that film still stands as one of the more chilling films I've ever seen. I had attended the DOC NYC film festival there in 2009-2010, and I'm glad that it's still going strong all these years later. It's a nice theater, situated in the West Village, and was really nice to revisit this past weekend.

Thoughts on Hobson's Choice

    On Criterion, I watched Hobson’s Choice, a 1954 British film directed by David Lean, and co- written by Lean, Wynyard Browne, and Norman Spencer, adapted from the 1916 play of the same name by Harold Brighouse. The film starred Charles Laughton as an 1880s Victorian widowed bookmaker who is a miser and has three grown daughters, and doesn’t pay them wages. He is fine with his two younger daughters getting married but laughs at the thought of his eldest daughter, Maggie (Brenda de Banzie) ever getting married, telling her she’s too old to think about it, “thirty and shelved.” Though when he’s around his bar friends, he says he needs Maggie around to help with the business, vs. his less serious daughters.

    Out of spite towards her father, Maggie decides to marry Will (Sir John Mills), a meek boot maker in the shop, and she’s essentially telling him they are going to marry, even if he doesn’t love her.

    The movie becomes more of a romantic comedy, with a Taming of the Shrew twist feel on it, and Mills brings a lot of nerdy charm as Will, who starts out as nervous and shy and builds more confidence and self-assurance as the story progresses. de Banzie was really fun in a very matter of fact way, knowing she’ll be the one to take care of her alcoholic father and running the business, and using her business sense and pragmatic skills to figure out situations. And Charles Laughton is fun in a gregarious, hammy kind of way as Hobson, playing drunk in a very theatrical way and being a bit of a doofus. It’s really a lovely gem to watch, and I heard of it from hearing Michael Cera recommend it on his Criterion Closet episode, saying “It’s like a Disney movie, flourishing music, every wall to wall gesture,” and called it a magical experience.

Thoughts on Materialists

     At the Angelika Film Centre this week, I went to see Materialists, a 2025 romantic film written and directed by Celine Song. The film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a failed actor who works as a successful agent at a matchmaking company, who has matched people leading to nine marriages, and sees love and romance as mathematical equations, matching people based on stats and similar backgrounds and levels of attractiveness and incomes and class status, and she herself wants to marry a rich man and be well-taken care. She makes an annual salary of $80K at her job, lives in a first floor apartment in Manhattan, and can easily pitch her services to people by offering it as a way to enhance their lives and customize partner matches for them.

    At the wedding of one of her matches, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom's brother, who comes from a wealthy family in finances, works in private equity, has a $12 million penthouse apartment, and is the perfect package, according to Lucy's standards. She calls him a "unicorn," saying that he is the kind of perfect match a client would hope to find, but wouldn't able to find someone who is rich, handsome, kind, stylish, all in one package, and settling for what is more attainable. She tries inviting Harry to have a membership at the matchmaking service, but he wants to date her. She refuses at first, saying she grew up poor (which is funny to hear, given Johnson comes from a Hollywood family going back two generations), is in her thirties and older than the typical early-twentysomething most older men want to date, that her looks will fade sooner than later, etc. But Harry is attracted to her, and they have a whirlwind romance, fulfilling her fantasies of being swept up by a rich man.

    But at the same time she meets Harry at the wedding, she runs into John (Chris Evans), who is working as a caterer there and continues to pursue acting. They end up reconnecting, and he still has lingering feelings for her, but she remembers that she broke up with him because she hated that he was poor and always broke, driving a rundown car, living in a grimy apartment with roommates, and still seemed immature well into adulthood. She felt guilty for resenting him for being poor, but that she herself wanted financial stability from a partner, not just earning her own income. John is 37, working catering jobs while acting in a play in a black box theater, and clearly outgrowing the messy chaos of living with roommates who don't wash the dishes or leave used condoms on the kitchen floor.

    When John learns that Lucy is dating Harry, he is polite about it, but does question Lucy about it, and it becomes more of a complicated love triangle between her feelings for Harry and John, of wanting money and financial security vs. being poor with someone with whom she has history.

    I was mixed on the movie. I appreciated that Song was exploring the mechanical feelings of dating and finding someone compatible based on stats and money, as well as superficial values on age and appearances, and there are funny montage scenes where Lucy is talking to potential clients who have rigid criteria for their dating preferences, and Lucy's quiet sarcasm (as Johnson charmingly displays in press interviews) is fun to watch, like when she goes off on someone who essentially wants the company to create a man from scratch based on her two page list of requirements, being like "I cannot build you a husband." Those scenes worked really well, and the film opens with a sweet prologue of early humans displaying courtship with flowers and the man placing a flower tied like a ring on the woman's finger. 

    Plus, the film had beautiful cinematography by Shabier Kirchner, who worked on Song's directorial debut Past Lives (2023) and Steve McQueen's five-part anthology series Small Axe (2020). I especially liked a dinner scene between Lucy and Harry where the camera is stationery and shows them in profile, having conversations in long takes, which created more quiet intimacy for the characters and the audience in that sequence.

    But I couldn't get invested in the characters themselves, because they felt empty to me. Johnson is charismatic and funny in interviews, but when she's doing the dramatic scenes, comes off as flat and wooden, and lacking romantic on-screen chemistry with either Pascal or Evans. Pascal looks lost in this film, even if he does get to have a good scene much later on that shows more hidden depth to his character beyond his wealthy appearances. And Evans looked mentally checked out during the romantic scenes, and I didn't find it believable with his Hollywood superhero looks that his character would be slumming it in a crappy apartment at 37 (nearly 45 in real life) with roommates, scrapping by to earn a living.

    I couldn't feel enough history between Lucy and John's backstory as a former couple to root for them to get back together, being unsure if they only broke up because of her class issues or if there were other mitigating factors. I also felt like her romance with Harry was more based in fantasy than reality, because I didn't feel like either of them got to know each other as real people, just being interested in each other for superficial reasons.

    I also got angry at a subplot that happens with a tertiary character, that I felt was completely unnecessary and cruel to the character, and while I got it was supposed to serve as a contrast to the romantic fantasy that Lucy was living with Harry, I was still mad that the movie took those directions, dumping it on a character who felt like Lucy was treating in a patronizing way, and their story got wrapped up way too quickly in a way that I felt was unrealistic.

    I preferred Past Lives because I felt more of a genuine connection and intimacy between the characters that I didn't feel in this, and I liked its quiet simplicity, which this film had in some parts, but lost when it went towards more Hollywood-type third act drama. I'm glad that Celine Song got a sophomore follow-up, and a wider audience, I just felt parts of this movie felt underdeveloped and could have been improved with better choices in screenwriting and casting.

Thoughts on The Swimmer

   On Criterion, I watched The Swimmer, a 1968 drama written and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry, based on John Cheever's short story of the same name. The film starred Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, a middle-aged, fit, and wealthy advertising executive who lives in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, and he drops by a pool party held by old friends, wearing only a bathing suit, and having drinks with them. He's popular, with many rich friends, and skates through life, repeatedly referring to his daughters "playing tennis at home." He looks over the hilly area where his home is further south, and connects a "river" of swimming pools at his friends' homes that lead to his home, and decides he is going to swim his way home, walking barefoot in his bathing suit and taking swims in each pool. His friends think his plan is amusing, though they are also nursing hangovers from a party the night before, so they may not be thinking clearly.

    So Ned sets on his way, walking through the woods and dropping up unexpectedly at his friends' homes, and as he makes his odyssey home, the people he meets with are from his past, and reveal more about his character as being a shallow, cheap, snobby person. He sees Julie (Janet Landgard), a former babysitter who watched his kids, who is now a young woman of 20, and confesses that she had a crush on him as a teen, only for her crush to become more disillusioned when she briefly joins him on his journey. He stops by friends who are a nudist couple, who aren't bothered by his eccentricities but are put off by his posturing. He is condescending to the hired driver (Bernie Hamilton) of one of his friends, asking about where the previous driver Steve is, who the new driver doesn't know, and being oblivious to the new driver being put off by his classist attitude towards "the help."

    As his path home becomes increasingly grim, the film becomes more of an allegory about Ned living in a fantasy, refusing to accept realities of his true character or how people really see him, and Lancaster is excellent in starting off as a broad-chested, handsome man and becoming a broken shell of a person with his whole life shattered, having a psychotic break with reality. 

    This film was excellent, feeling like a horror film without being classified as one, because it's about an entitled upper-class man having a crisis where, beyond his sunny demeanor, all of his ugliness comes to light, and especially pointed out by people he's hurt and stepped on (especially in an excellent scene with Janice Rule as his former mistress), until he looks like a loser standing in the rain in just his bathing suit, a complex performance of vulnerability by a symbol of machismo like Burt Lancaster, known for noir films and tough guy roles.

    I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts were each giving their top ten list of the best 24-hour movies in an episode from last year, and thought it sounded really interesting, and I'm glad I watched it, it was a great movie.

Thoughts on Bring Her Back

   Last week, I saw the 2025 Australian supernatural horror film Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. The film focuses on step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who are placed in foster care after finding their father dead in the shower. Andy is a few months away from turning 18, and wants to apply for guardianship of Piper, who is also visually impaired. They don't want to be split up in the foster care system, so they are placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor whose daughter Cathy (who also was visually impaired) recently passed away, so she is excited to take care of Piper, seeing her as a surrogate daughter, and showing much more favoritism towards her than to Andy, who she views as a troublemaker. Laura is also taking care of her mute foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who keeps acting out in disturbing ways and is a threat to the pet cat (and thankfully no actual harm comes to the cat during the movie).

    Laura is all smiles and cheeriness, playing up that kind of positivity that Hawkins portrayed in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, but views Andy as a threat, who sees more red flags going on than Piper is aware of. She goes through his phone messages, she makes him kiss his father's corpse at his funeral, she blames him if Oliver gets out of his room and destroys things, and she manipulates things to make Andy seem dangerous to get rid of him and have Piper to herself. Andy is determined to protect Piper from Laura's danger, and keeps trying to reach out to authorities for help, but Laura keeps finding ways to swing things back around to her favor.

    Sally Hawkins is fantastic in this film, and is great at playing up the manipulative personality of a woman who is grieving the loss of her daughter, and going to extremes to want to "bring her back," which includes conducting occult practices, as seen in VHS found footage tapes of demonic cult rituals. Laura also takes advantage of Piper's disability, lying to her about her surroundings whenever there is anything disturbing, since she can see blurry shapes and colors but not definite images like a sighted person can.

    Andy is torn between grieving the loss of his father, while also remembering his father as abusive towards him, but affectionate towards Piper, so Piper has a more loving memory of him than he did, and having nightmare flashbacks of his father when he's in the shower, reliving the trauma of finding him dead there.

    The child actors excel in this film, especially with Phillips playing a disturbed child, in difficult scenes where he is performing twisted acts, especially a scene involving a knife, so hopefully he was well taken care of while filming horror scenes like that. Wong shines more in the last third of the film, as she as Piper becomes more aware of Laura's nature, and having to defend herself while being visually impaired, which makes for some really suspenseful scenes. And Barratt holds the film together with a lot of vulnerability as Andy, as a traumatized kid on the brink of adulthood struggling with grief while trying to protect his sister from danger.

    There's a lot of dread in the film, and a frequent use of water as a threat, like the empty swimming pool filling up with rainwater, hearing rain tapping outside, the isolated feeling of Laura's home, and the loneliness while the main characters are all grieving in their own ways.

    I really liked this film, and found it interesting in being about grief and focusing more so on character studies. I wasn't as into the demonic cult stuff, especially if it got too gory, but the film was held together by solid acting performances and a bleak narrative that was compelling to watch.

Thoughts on Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

     Yesterday, I went to the Angelika Film Center and saw Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a 2024 French romantic comedy written and directed by Laura Piani. The film stars Camille Rutherford as Agathe, a young Parisian woman who works at Shakespeare & Company with her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly). She lives with her sister and her six-year-old nephew, and is struggling with trauma since her parents were killed in an automobile accident in which she was injured. She takes her bicycle everywhere and is afraid to get in cars. She is told by her writing teacher not to write "cheap romances" anymore and to get out of her comfort zone, but when she's drinking sake in a Chinese restaurant, she imagines a man's face at the bottom of her cup and fantasizes about him, inspiring her to write romances. She has confused, unrequited feelings for Félix, who is a casual player in dating, and she hasn't had sex in two years. She isn't into the dating app culture or swiping, and is lonely and pines for more of a romantic connection.

    Her sister tells her she needs to break out of her funk and get out of her head. Then, she gets an invite in the mail to the Jane Austen Residency in England, a two-week writing retreat. Félix, knowing that she adores Austen and identifies with Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion (for being an old maid), secretly sent her work to them and got her accepted. She reluctantly goes, taking the Channel ferry across from Paris to London, and she kisses Félix and departs.

    At the ferry's terminal in England, she is picked up by Oliver (Charlie Anson), a distant descendant of Jane Austen, who is not a fan of her work, and takes her to the retreat in a mansion, hosted by his elderly parents. There, she meets the other writers, and struggles with writer's block, and over the course of the time, struggles with her romantic feelings towards Félix and later Oliver, who starts off seeming arrogant but opens up more to Agathe about his personal struggles.

    I really enjoyed this film. I liked how it was mostly about a woman struggling with her creative process as a writer, dealing with trauma from her past, and learning how to get out of her writer's block to be an artist and let go. I wasn't as into the love triangle parts, finding it predictable as who she would end up with, but it's a romantic comedy, so I knew that would be a part of it going in. 

    Rutherford is really lovely and charming as a lead, with romantic dark brown curls, and is French-British in real life and fluent in French and English, as is her character, and the film is written so that the majority of characters are bilingual in both languages, easily switching between both languages whenever they want. I really enjoyed her connection with Oliver's mom Beth (Liz Crowther), an old English woman speaking to her in French and being very hospitable and sweet, and encouraging her in her talents and passion as a writer. I also liked when she developed friendships with two other women (Annabelle Lengronne; Lola Peprow) at the residency, of them being supportive of each other and going out to a bar to sing and get drunk and have fun. In the film opening, there's a fun scene of Agathe in the bookstore singing along to the song "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke, and it's really adorable and cute.

    I thought this was a really nice movie, a sweet bilingual romantic comedy, and I'm happy I checked it out.